Finland Did Not Win: The Lost Realism of the Winter War

It was the painful realism that followed its defeats, not the celebrated heroism of 1939, that allowed Finland to thrive. The lesson for Ukraine today is clear

In the established Western imagination, the Winter War of 1939–1940 occupies an honoured place as a moral fable: the small, plucky democracy resisting a totalitarian colossus, vindicated by skis, sniper rifles, and superior pluck. Today, with Kiev exhausted and Western capitals scouring history for usable analogies, the Finnish example is invoked with the regularity of a metronome. Resist Russia, the moral of the story runs, and the bear retreats.

The trouble is that Finland did not win the Winter War. It lost. It then lost the Continuation War comprehensively. And it was the wisdom Helsinki acquired after both defeats — not the heroism of 1939 — that built the prosperous Nordic democracy the West now claims as its own success story.

Classic photo of the Finnish-Soviet Winter War 1939-40. The Finns, in winter uniforms, defending their homeland

Sweden’s Eastern Myths

Some of the biggest mythmaking about the Winter War comes from Finland’s neighbour, Sweden, which, along with Finland, joined NATO after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Some myth-busting is in order: Sweden was for centuries the upstart imperial power of the North, an ambitious and aggressive state that built itself by seizing territory from neighbours and treating its peripheries — Sami country, Lapland — as extraction colonies. Finnish-speakers were the grunts who fought Swedish wars against Denmark and Russia; the Finnish elite hid behind Swedish surnames well into the nineteenth century.

Viking appetite

Wars between Sweden and Russia have run in both directions across many centuries. Both sides have sinned and been sinned against. But there has been, in Swedish strategic culture from the Vikings onward, a persistent sense that Russia is a space available for Swedish expansion. Swedes founded a fortress at the same location where Peter the Great later built Saint Petersburg. A huge shock came when Finland was lost in 1809. The conviction that a third of “their” territory was unjustly seized by the Tsars coloured the aristocracy and the officer corps for generations, and a ghost of it lingers in today’s Stockholm consensus on Ukraine.

It is one of history’s small ironies that Russia, not Sweden, gave Finland a real opportunity to develop as a nation. After 1809, the Grand Duchy of Finland enjoyed a constitution, parliamentary self-government, and access to the vast imperial market — privileges no other corner of the Tsar’s domain possessed. While Russia was undoubtedly autocratic, the Finnish literary language (as expressed in the Kalevala), Finnish art, Finnish national consciousness — all flourished under the first eight decades of Russian rule as they had not under Swedish rule.

Juho Paasikivi (1870-1956), Finnish diplomat and statesman. President of Finland 1946-56. Advocate of conciliation and accommodation with the USSR.

Enter Paasikivi

Of all the figures in modern Finnish history, none was clearer-eyed than Juho Kusti Paasikivi, the bourgeois banker who served as chief negotiator with Stalin in October and November 1939, and who would later become president of the republic. His memoirs — sober, mordant, and almost wholly absent from contemporary Western discussion — record a Stalin who was patient, almost professorial, sketching maps on the table, conceding minor points, but immovable on the strategic core.

Finnish fears were real and grounded. But Stalin’s reasoning, as Paasikivi understood it, was strategic rather than ideological. Leningrad lay 32 kilometres from the Finnish frontier. The 1918 Finnish republic had been backed by Germany; its Whites had crushed its Reds; its political class was openly anti-Bolshevik. From Moscow’s vantage, White Finland was a plausible conduit for German power, as it would prove to be in 1941. “We cannot move Leningrad,” Stalin remarked in effect, “so we must move the border.” In exchange for a strip of the Karelian Isthmus, a lease on Hanko as a naval base, and a handful of islands in the Gulf, Finland would receive twice as much territory elsewhere.

Paasikivi was no fellow traveller. He returned to Helsinki convinced that the terms, however painful, were intelligible and negotiable. He is unsparing on Foreign Minister Eljas Erkko, whom he portrays as having persuaded himself that Stalin was bluffing. The cabinet’s misreading of Soviet aggression, he concluded, cost Finland the Winter War. The terms imposed at Moscow in March 1940, after tens of thousands of Finnish dead that a small country could ill afford, were considerably worse than what had been on offer four months earlier.

The catastrophe of co-belligerency

Worse followed. In 1941 Helsinki tied itself to Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, joining the siege of Leningrad in pursuit of a Greater Finland. The result was something close to a million civilian dead in the besieged city, and a network of Finnish camps for Russian civilians and prisoners whose mortality rate, in materials published by the Finnish National Archives, has been documented as roughly 50% higher than that of corresponding German camps in the same region, as detailed by official Finnish historian Lars Westerlund¹:

“The treatment of the POWs would, in a broad sense, include issues such as food
supply, accommodation, clothing, health care, and discipline, but it is my intention
in this survey to focus solely on the death rate among the POWs. In Norway this
was about 14%, among the POWs in German custody, in Finland it was perhaps
roughly 20% for POWs in German custody, and among Soviet POWs in Finnish
custody it was approximately 30%.”²

These are not Russian propaganda figures. They bear the imprimatur of a Finnish political class that, in an earlier and more honest era, was prepared to acknowledge them.

Source for Finland’s POW abuses: Westerlund, Lars, ed. Prisoners of War Deaths and People Handed Over to Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939–55: A Research Report by the Finnish National Archives. Helsinki: Kansallisarkisto, 2008. Link to Report

Abuses in the Finnish camps

Behind the statistical disparity lay a regime of systematic deprivation. Captured Red Army soldiers had their serviceable boots and uniforms stripped on arrival, re-dyed grey-green, and reissued to the Finnish Army; the prisoners themselves were left in old ragged uniforms which, in the words of the Danish war correspondent Holger Hörsholt Hansen, could not have been used at the front. In summer they were forbidden footwear altogether — a measure which, as Colonel Lauri Tiainen of the home army staff frankly explained, both saved leather and reduced the temptation to flee. Frostbite ran through the medical huts.

Rations were skimmed at every level of the camp hierarchy — by guards, command staff, and trustee prisoners alike — so that, as Westerlund puts it, a tiny fraction of the prisoners gained weight while most somehow stubbornly held on, and the rest starved. The euphemism “stomach disease” in the camp registers, he notes, almost certainly conceals widespread “diarrhea caused by hunger.” Men in this condition were then put to heavy labour, including, in plain breach of the Geneva Convention, the clearing of mines.

The violence was as routine as the privation. Westerlund’s chapter records that “dozens and dozens” of Soviet prisoners were killed in the camps without just cause and that “many thousands” were grossly or moderately maltreated; he reckons that many thousands of official floggings or beatings with truncheons preceded interrogations during the Continuation War — itself, he notes, a practice in conflict with the convention. The arithmetic is hard to soften.

The Finnish National Archives’ own tabulation records 1,019 Soviet prisoners of war and 19 civilians shot dead by camp guards and command staff: the equivalent of an entire battalion executed in detention.

Antti Kujala, in the same volume, reconstructs the everyday rationale: rear-area camp guards, he writes, “upheld discipline through unlawful executions,” and the typical victim was a recaptured fugitive or an insubordinate prisoner killed as a warning example to his fellows. A parallel German operation on the same peninsula — Organisation Todt’s labour pool of roughly a thousand Soviet POWs in northern Finland — lost 216 men to exhaustion and illness in the two months to early 1943, a mortality rate of nearly 22 per cent in a single winter, and was described by a Finnish liaison officer simply as a “dying crowd.” That this German figure was the lower number on the peninsula is itself the point.

When the Continuation War ended, Finland had again backed the wrong horse. And yet — and this is the part the moralisers rarely mention — Stalin let Finland off lightly. The 1940 territorial losses were confirmed, a strip connecting Finland to the Arctic Sea was lost, but a military base at a new location on the Finnish coast, at Porkkala, was returned in 1956. No Soviet troops were stationed on Finnish soil after that. Finland kept its parliament, its press, its democracy, its place in the Western cultural and economic order. The country that had helped besiege Leningrad emerged with its sovereignty intact.

The merits of ‘Finlandization’

The decades that followed — the much-derided era of “Finlandization” — saw Finland become one of the wealthiest countries in Europe. There was censorship, certainly, and President Urho Kekkonen is said to have held weekly saunas with the KGB station chief. But Finnish democracy was real, Finnish culture was free, and Finnish industry profited handsomely from privileged access to the Soviet market. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Finnish unemployment surged precisely because the relationship had been so commercially valuable.

Helsinki in the1960s-70s during President Kekkonen, when foreign policy was not allowed to be anti Soviet. The city was just as western, modern and rich as Copenhagen or Stockholm

The narrative now ascendant in Stockholm and Helsinki — that Finland prevailed in the Winter War, that the outcome established lasting deterrence, that the alternative was slavery — inverts the historical record. Finland lost the Winter War and the Continuation War alike. It then prospered through a sober accommodation with the larger neighbour it could not defeat. Small countries adjust to large ones. Mexico and Canada do the same.

The Ukrainian comparison

The relevance to Ukraine is uncomfortable but unavoidable. The Minsk agreements, whatever their flaws, were considerably milder than what Stalin demanded of Finland in 1939. Had Kiev treated them as Paasikivi treated Stalin’s terms — as a strategic problem to be negotiated rather than a moral affront to be defied — the country might already have arrived at something like the profitable post-1945 Finnish settlement. Instead, encouraged by Western capitals enchanted by the Winter War myth, Ukraine fought, and is now contemplating losses that no negotiated settlement would ever have imposed.

Minsk Treaties

What Minsk actually demanded of Kiev was modest by any historical comparison. Minsk I, signed in Belarus in September 2014 by Ukraine, Germany, France and Russia, called for a ceasefire, a prisoner exchange, the withdrawal of heavy weapons, OSCE monitoring and a promise of “special status” and local elections for the Donbas. Minsk II, signed in February 2015 and endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2202 with Obama’s approval, elaborated on that autonomy and called on Kiev to amend its constitution to allow federalism for the eastern provinces and to protect the Russian language. As Scott Horton documents in Provoked, the Rada promptly passed a law making implementation impossible by inverting the sequence of obligations, while Berlin, Paris and Poroshenko himself would later admit that the Minsk process had served them chiefly as a stalling device, a way of buying Ukraine time to rearm rather than a framework to be honoured.³

Soviet terms

The terms imposed on Finland in 1944 — territorial cessions, a long lease on the Porkkala naval base, heavy reparations and a forced ban on its far-right organisations — were considerably steeper than what Minsk asked of Kiev. The difference is that Helsinki had a Paasikivi who could read the geopolitical balance and pay the bill, while Ukraine, encouraged by Washington and Brussels, treated a binding international framework as a tactical convenience to be discarded the moment the army was ready.

Paasikivi understood, in a way our own foreign-policy class no longer can, that prudence is not cowardice and that geography is not negotiable. Finland’s eventual flourishing was not built on the sniper rifles of 1939 but on the realism of 1944. It is the lesson the Atlantic security elite cannot bring itself to teach, because to teach it would be to acknowledge that the moralism of liberal hawkery has costs measured in cities, generations, and republics. The ghost of the old banker still has things to say. Whether anyone in Washington, Brussels, Helsinki or Stockholm is prepared to listen is another question entirely.

1. Westerlund, Lars, ed. POW Deaths and People Handed Over to Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939–55: A Research Report by the Finnish National Archives. Helsinki: 2008, Finnish National Archives., 95

2. Lars Westerlund ed., POW Deaths and People Handed Over to Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939–55 (Helsinki: Finnish National Archives, 2008), pp. 14, 24–25, 35, 71–76, 91, 121

3. Scott Horton, Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine (The Libertarian Institute, 2024). What the Rada — Ukraine’s parliament — did, almost immediately after the deal was signed, was reverse the agreed on order of political federalisation reforms and then Russian handover of Donbass. It passed legislation, and the government around Poroshenko publicly insisted that Russia must first hand over control of the eastern border to Kiev before any of the political steps (special status, elections, constitutional amendment) would be carried out. In other words, Kiev said: you give us the border, the rebels disarm, the military advantage shifts, and then we will see about the rights and the elections.